The problem is all fixed and most games that were affected are restored to normal. The problem was a badly written script that had a logic problem. I was cleaning up a directory vital to that script's operation and inadvertantly triggered it to remove all files in the judge directory that had been modified more than 3 days ago.
If anyone lost dedication because of this, please contact me and I will get on to restoring that.
Yesterday's problem repeated itself like clockwork -- at roughly 2 AM June 1 New Zealand time a number of critical files vanished from NZMB's directory. Because of the regularity, I am beginning to suspect some sort of rogue cron job or the like. I am investigating tge situation as thoroughly as I can given that it's finals week for me (great timing, huh) and I have loads of other stuff to get done. I will try to keep this from recurring.
Last nights event was even worse since the first problem apparently hosed the backup script, so I had to piece together the most recent versions of things. In the end, I don't think much, if anything, was lost, but if you have evidence to the contrary, mail me immediately. I am going to recover the backup script and try to prevent this from happening as soon as I can. Thanks for your patience and sorry again for any inconvenience.
Today, May 30 (May 31 in New Zealand), I discovered that the NZMB Judge had stopped working and that several files were missing from its directory on the gem.win.co.nz machine (including most of the NZMB Web page). Fortunately, I had a recent back up of game state information stored on a different hard drive. After unsucessfully trying to restore the Judge witgh the files I did have, I restored from this backup. It is only an hour or two behind when the problem seems to have occured.
In the process of trying to fix this, I had to process pieces of mail through multiple times, and it is possible that some mail has gotten lost in the whole mess. If you have sent a message to NZMB recently and not received a reply, please resend it. Game masters, please check that everything with your game looks OK. If anything needs to be fixed that you can't figure out how to deal with, send me a mail at judge-request@gem.win.co.nz.
Mario and myself will be looking into what caused this incident. In the meantime, NZMB's home page will be inaccessible until I can get it off of the long term back up (it was not backed up with the judge game data). My apologies for the inconvenience.
--Tim Miller, May 30, 2004